Casino Jack's Book

If you watched the Last Word this week with Lawrence O'Donnell, you would have seen a Jack Abramoff, who seemed to be beaten down and defeated. The show had a peculiar interlude at the end where Michael Moore and Jack Abramoff discussed their conversation with each other.

Having appeared on 60 Minutes and other television shows, the notorious lobbyist who inspired the movie Casino Jack starring Kevin Spacey talked the language of reform.

I actually bought his book because I wanted to see whether he would write about his days in the Republican College Students' associations and how he developed the early relationships with Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, his co-conspirators. I have to admit I was surprised at how good the book is. It's a Bonfire of the Vanities of a Generation X'er, who rises and falls and crashes and burns. If you ever have to write a memoir after you have been brought down in a massive scandal, this book should serve as the model. Abramoff never backs away from his conservative politics and even the tactics he employed in various political fights. At the same time, he details how he bought congressmen--once bragging he owned 100--with bribes and gifts.

His book details the role of lobbyists in our political system and how he created strategies which would actually ensure his clients won , even if it was at the expense of the public good. It's all well and good that Washington now looks back at Abramoff as the most evil lobbyist who ever worked Washington but dozens of our congress people who took cash from him still serve and others have become lobbyists themselves.

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey his father was the chairman of Arnold Palmer's Miniature Golf courses. Who knew that existed? Arnie actually taught him to play golf. Later when the family was living in Hollywood, the great Sugar Ray Robinson, who did charity work with his father,made the call to the Admissions Director at Brandeis to get him admission since he was on the waiting list and time was moving on.

At Brandeis, he joined and took over the College Republicans ,eventually heading the group nation-wide. He joined up with Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed and developed new conservative politics basec on the Leninist techniques they saw in the radical Left. The take no prisoners philosophy we see today and is called over-reach is a result of their early 1980s actions and gaining a commitment from the Republican party to secure more training facilities and courses for organizers and candidates. By the time Abramoff reached his heyday as a lobbyist in the early 1990s, congress with the Gingrich Revolution was filled with people trained during this period and who were more committed to conservative ideology than the party establishment.

None of this Abramoff disowns. He recounts how his three amigos along with Jack Wheeler staged a conference of anti-Communist guerrilla groups in Angola with Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA forces. I remember this vividly because I knew Savimbi from the mid-1970s and he called me to travel into Jamba, his provisional capital of Free Angola, to get me to brief him on who these people were who just left him. And throughout the 1980s, this would be the practice after every time he encountered them in Washington. His most trusted aides would call me and relay the advice given to Savimbi by Grover Norquist and want me to head it off at the past.

Abramoff soon got burned out and decided to make his film Red Scropion, which entailed film-making in Africa. His chapters on this are amusing since they mirror some of my own experiences with trying to deal with logistics of film-making in Africa--the endless postponements, the agreements, then the backing out. Abramoff meets with Sidney Pollack about the problems he faced making Out of Africa in Kenya. Sidney told him to bail out of Africa and film it in Mexico. Abramoff didn't and his film was made and only did well with distribution deals in non-English countries.

By the time of the 1990s, he came back to Washington and was offered a lobbyist job. Here his descriptions are apt. At first he was appalled that Washington lobbyists really didn't work hard for their clients and could care less whether they produced results. I've pondered for years this phenomenon as African state after African state forked over millions to lobbyists and never got anything from them. Well, Jack decided that he would be different and he signed up with Bill Gates' father's lobbyist firm.

The tales spins out from there of an overly ambitious, driven young man starting to earn big bucks by affecting how countries and companies could protect their markets by sheparding crowds of congressmen and their staffs to places like the Marianas Islands. He was so successful at it that he eventually changed firms and secured an office near Lafayette Park overlooking the White House.

One of the things that eventually caught up with him was his dealings with native American nations. Here, Abramoff is unapologetic about his role in securing casino gambling rights for tribes around the country and what this did to their standard of living. As someone interested in indian affairs, these chapters were riveting , even though I have no interest in casino gambling. Congressmen and people like Governor Don Seigelman of Alabama became casualties of Abramoff's maneuvers. He used Ralph Reed, siphoning funds to non-profit organizations, to organize anti-gambling Christians to oppose casinos for rivals to Abramoff's tribes. Throw in the mix that Abramoff's Indian business rubbed other Indian lobbyists the wrong way and you have combustible jet fuel.

While managing all these accounts, Abramoff's mania was unchecked. He invested millions into creating D.C.'s only and finest Kosher restaurant. He provided millions to create a Jewish High school in Maryland. All the while clients started stiffing him on fees and his partners were getting nervous about all their debts.

During this time the media had hundreds of stories about this Whiz-Kid lobbyist and naturally reaction set in. As he details in the book, congressmen would come into his restaurant stiff him for the bill and walk away with envelopes stuffed with money. He was ecumenical about whom he would purchase. Democrats like Chris Dodd and Harry Reid and Nighthorse Campbell joined the Ney, DeLay, Senator McCain and other Republicans.

Then the Washington Post started investigating and rivals on the Hill started making pubic complaints. And soon his tribes changed leadership and didn't renew his contracts, leaving his firm out in the cold. Soon complaints were being heard from the Indian tribes about being ripped off. This all culminated in the infamous Senate hearings where Senators read his mocking e-mails about his clients and he was forced to plead the 5th. The irony was that every one of the Senators at the public hearing had received buckets of money from him for their re-election campaigns.

Finally he was nailed and indicted for several felonies. His company fired him and the whole house of cards collapsed. He was sentenced to prison and only got out in 2010.

His book warns against false reforms of our system because everyone knows how to get around the reforms. He argues that no one receiving federal funds such as defense contractors should be allowed to lobby, anyone who served in congress or on a congressional staff should not be allowed to lobby and he even goes so far as recommending that no congressperson should be allowed to vote on any federal funding in his or her own district. In the book he supports the Tea Part movement and also argues for term limitations. In his television interviews he expresses sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement because he argues the system is corrupt and he was one of those involved in the corruption.

The book is "Capitol Punishment: The Hard truth About Washington Corruption from America's Most Notorious Lobbyist", just pubished by WND books.

What's so interesting is that Abramoff publishes his lobbying fees from the 1990s and early 2000s in his book and compared to today's salaries he looks like a piker. The Philadelphia Inquirer quipped that compared to what's happening now in D.C. Abramoff now seems like Mahatma Gandhi.

And think of the intense lobbying against the health reform bill, the Wall Street reform bill and almost any of the reforms proposed by President Obama. The sums of money now being spent on lobbying is astronomical and the eventual price paid by Americans is enormous. Just in tax concessions alone,America loses $1.5 trillion in revenues a year. These were hammered out by lobbyists working with congressional staffs. If you read the list of the whole profits by oil companies and the top American companies, look no further than actions in Washington as the cause.

His story would be even more stereotypical if he had fueled his mania with cocaine. But it's a story of an Orthodox Jewish man who seemed not to have a moral compass or know any boundaries. Even his charitable giving was excessive and almost bankrupted him.

His compatriot Ralph Reed has recovered. According to Abramoff, Reed was a boozer and saw a congressman in his cups fondling a female staffer outside a restaurant and figured that was his future if he didn't clean up. Now Reed hosts all the Republican hopefuls at his Freedom and Faith Coalition, a new version of the old Christian Coalition. Reed never went to jail.

And Grover Norquist continues tying Republicans up with his pledge not to raise taxes. As Abramoff describes Grover, he's a libertarian within the GOP and believes in privatizing defense. Now Grover is on the hotseat as America tries to overcome a generation of spree spending and tax cuts.